Fast Digs: The Northridge Velodrome

 It was January 1981 and the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee was still debating the best location for what would be a new Olympic Velodrome for the Games that were three and a half years away. Still in the selection jumble was a site at Balboa Park in San Diego, one at Harbor College, another at the Claremont Colleges, a third at the campus of California State University, Northridge (CSUN), and another at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH).

Rumor had it that only two of those sites were still being seriously considered - the one at CSUN, and the eventual approved site at CSUDH. The CSUN proposal had several points in its favor: For one thing, an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) had already been completed, soil at the site would not require additional expensive compaction, and finally, Mayor Tom Bradley, who had come under criticism for purportedly ignoring the Valley in the selection of Olympic venues, was apparently in favor of the CSUN plan as a means of appeasing political opponents.

Working against the CSUN proposal was the length of the track - the plan called for a 400 meter track, while the Olympic standard was a 333.3 meter track - and a seven million dollar price tag (the Olympic Committee had four million dollars available for the project). The university administration was unyielding in response to calls to alter their proposal; the Olympic Committee wished for the University to build a single-use facility, while the University was adamant that their "land base" could not "afford that luxury," insisting that they had to build a multi-use facility. As for the track length, CSUN argued that tracks all around the world varied in their length, many being upwards of 450 meters, while the Olympic track at Montreal (1976) was a mere 285 meters in length. (Illustration and excerpts from the CSUN Daily Sundial)